Ausmus passing his first real managerial test by not losing his cool

Detroit Tigers manager Brad Ausmus is seen in the dugout during the sixth inning of a baseball game against the Texas Rangers in Detroit, Thursday, May 22, 2014. Entering Tuesdays’ game in Oakland, the Tigers have lost seven of their last eight games.
CARLOS OSORIO — The Associated Press

After his Detroit Tigers ripped off 11 straight road wins, and six wins in a row, including three in Fenway — where the franchise almost NEVER wins three straight — and generally looking like they might just be a 100-win team, the ship has careened off in the other direction.

Thanks primarily to lackluster starting pitching — with the starters posting an ERA of 9.00 — the Tigers lost seven of eight through Monday night.

Advertisement

They’ve given up 56 runs in five games, and been outscored by 31. Monday’s 10-0 loss to the A’s was just the second time they’d been shut out, but the fifth time they’ve given up double-digit runs. Four of those instances have come in the past week.

“Normally we play much more soundly than this. Normally, we pitch much better. We’ve been playing very good defense, and we’re the best hitting team in the league, so normally we’re going to be scoring runs,” catcher Alex Avila said after Sunday’s loss.

“I’ve said it for a bunch of years: You need all three of those facets of the game — pitching, defense and timely hitting — to win games. Sometimes, you’re going to have one slacking for a little bit of a stretch, but you need at least two of those to be able to compete. Lately, we really haven’t had any of those. ...

“(It’s been) everything. ... We just haven’t played good baseball. We haven’t gotten pitching. We haven’t particularly played that good of defense, or really, we’ve gotten hits, but we haven’t gotten timely hits.

“It’s a just a bad stretch of baseball this week.”

Ummm ... yup.

The test for Ausmus, however, is not necessarily for him to fly off the handle, or to blow up, or to start pushing buttons randomly, to see what happens.

“One thing I can do, is sleep. I think playing as long as I did, I became very adept at forgetting about what happened,” Ausmus said Sunday. “I don’t look back and I don’t look ahead, because there’s nothing I can do. ... I think that’s probably compartmentalizing to the extreme.”

If he had changed, that would be the quickest way to lose the locker room.

Rather than do something drastic, Ausmus is likely to do something more subtle.

He doesn’t need to flip out, or flip office chairs, or locker room furnishings. He doesn’t need to yell, scream or cajole. (Even the guy he replaced, whom everyone assumed was more like that, Jim Leyland, said that was the quickest way for a manager to burn himself out in a month, and his players out in weeks.)

More likely, Ausmus’ tack was akin to something he’d done before, when he and his Astros teammates were flying to St. Louis after Game 5 of the 2005 National League Championship Series.

One out away from clinching the series, the Astros had decided to pitch carefully to Albert Pujols. Only All-Star closer Brad Lidge hung a slider that Pujols launched to deep left field to put St. Louis ahead, 5-4, and extend the series.

“I went from having to yell to hear the umpire, to being able hear the people in the center field restaurant talking. That was the difference,” Ausmus recalled. “That’s the only game I had trouble sleeping after, my entire career. I never had trouble sleeping, because of the game.”

Needless to say, the flight was fairly quiet.

“Thinking, if we don’t win one of the next two games, this at-bat was the turning point,” Ausmus said. “The whole team was down. You don’t feel good about losing a game like that. You’re at home, you could clinch your first appearance in the World Series in organizational history. And you gave up a 700-foot home run to lose it in the ninth. No one was feeling good about themselves.”

Ausmus had a plan, though.

“I just asked the pilot when we got on, that when we got to cruising altitude to mention that, if you looked to the left of the plane, you could see Albert Pujols’ home run ball,” Ausmus said. “He didn’t want to do it. I had to convince him to do it. He thought Brad Lidge might come into the cockpit, and start swinging at him. But he did it.”

It shocked everyone.

Until Lidge turned to look at Ausmus, who just waved.

“Then people were laughing,” said Ausmus, who singled in his first three at-bats in Game 6, while Roy Oswalt pitched the Astros into the World Series.

Things like that are part of the reason Ausmus was hired for the Tigers gig, without any managerial experience.

Phil Garner, the Astros’ manager that year, has credited that joke as being the most important thing said that season.

“I don’t know about that,” Ausmus deflected. “He was the manager, so I guess he’s right.”

And Ausmus, who’s now the manager, is probably right when he says this is just a blip, and for everyone to relax.